There are a few points, however, that I believe any serious and informed discussion of the Brandeis/Hirsi Ali honorary degree revocation need to address:

1. This incident is just one episode in what’s becoming a “disinvitation season” trend on campuses. We at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) used to jokingly refer to commencement season as “disinvitation season” because it was the time of the year when students and faculty members became most active in trying to get colleges to revoke invitations to speakers with whom they disagree. But each year the joke seems less funny, as the push to disinvite campus speakers only gets more widespread and intense. As I emphasized last week, while most of the media focus is on commencement speakers, disinvitation season has become a year-round phenomenon. Those who opposed Hirsi Ali’s disinvitation have chosen to focus narrowly on her and her controversial anti-Islamic points of view, but often ignore recent disinvitation campaigns against speakers including Condoleezza Rice, Ben Carson, Geraldo Rivera, Ben Stein, Meg Whitman, Robert Zoellick, and Ray Kelly (the last one, against Kelly, was a particularly ugly episode, because students not only objected prior to his campus appearance, but they eventually drowned out his speech with chants and heckling, allowing him to speak for only about 60 seconds before he could no longer make himself heard).

Focusing on just the Hirsi Ali revocation misses a much larger problem.

2. Brandeis University is named after one of the great heroes of freedom of speech in American jurisprudence, yet it has an abysmal track record when it comes to freedom of speech. Justice Louis Brandeis is one of my heroes; he was one of our nation’s greatest champions of freedom of speech and is equaled in importance in First Amendment history only by his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Brandeis campus is festooned with glowing quotes about the importance of freedom of speech from its famous namesake.

That’s what made it all the more outrageous that, in 2007, Brandeis found a professor guilty of racial harassment for uttering the racial epithet “wetbacks” whilecondemning the use of the term in his Latin American Politics class. Professor Hindley was explaining the origin of the epithet, which comes from stories of immigrants swimming across the Rio Grande. He was then somehow found guilty of racial harassment without so much as a hearing or a chance to defend himself against the accusation. Brandeis placed a monitor in his class and even threatened him with mandatory psychological counseling. It took the combined efforts of FIRE, the ACLU, and negative publicity in the media to get Brandeis to revoke the punishment.

The fact that Louis Brandeis’s namesake college is being used by students at other campuses to rationalize the exclusion of speakers on the basis of their beliefs is dizzyingly ironic, and terribly sad.

My fear is that 30 years of campus speech codes and the cultivation of the sense among students that they have a “right not to be offended” have pushed students into an even more radical tendency: rather than being taught to beware groupthink and confirmation bias, students demand to be confirmed in their beliefs and not even have those speakers they sharply disagree with present on campus. This “expectation of confirmation” plays havoc with the very purpose of a university, and it’s a formula for turning today’s crop of our best and brightest into an echo-chamber generation.